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10/31/2014

Halloween's here. Time to look stupid for that costume party sh*t, yes? Along with Christmas, Halloween is the time of year when we become extra generous — in terms of creativity and candies. You get busy decorating costumes and the party's set.

While you're at it, why not add a little more touch of terror by playing these film scores from some of the scariest movies of all time?

10/30/2014

"It's wise blood. It ain't everybody has it... see, it's a gift... the gift of the prophets."

- Enoch Emory

"A religious antireligious absurdism." That's quite a lot of adjectives there, but Wise Blood is essentially an absurdist tragicomedy about antitheism, which sprouts from the lead character's childhood guilt.

War veteran Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) is a twenty-something ambitious idealist. Driven by his own concept of truth, he starts his own church: The Church of Truth Without Christ, "where the blind can't see, the lame don't walk, and the dead stay that way."

10/20/2014

One of the things I love about The Virgin Suicides is its cinematography. Mainly employing shades of orange and blue, Edward Lachman (Far from Heaven, Erin Brockovich) achieves a remarkable blend of impossible dreamland and overwhelming dysphoria.

10/15/2014

You're probably looking at your keyboard to verify if T is beside Y. Yes, it is. And no, it's not a typo. I use yestertears every time I refer to not-so-happy things in the past, yet here they are crawling their way to the present just to haunt you.

That's what happens to the narrator in The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's stunning feature film debut. The film tackles the dilemma of angst-ridden adolescence, the downsides of being a girl, teenage sexuality, the anguish of yearning, and — of course — the complexity of suicide.

10/10/2014

In 2012, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke made one of the most emotionally intimate films of the 21st century: Amour. Remember that Adam Sandler song from The Wedding Singer? That somehow describes Amour.

Anne and Georges (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) are an octogenarian couple, blissfully married for a long time. Both are retired music teachers. Their forte: the piano. They live by themselves in a Paris apartment. Their only child (Isabelle Huppert) already has a family of her own, and is somewhat emotionally detached from her parents. (She cares more about trivial things like profiting from her parents' house.) One day, the couple suffers a major blow in their relationship when Anne suffers from dementia and then stroke.

10/05/2014

If The Magdalene Sisters was shown during the Magdalene laundries' "glory years" — no, wait — I don't think it would even be shown at all. The film is a massive punch in the face of those zealots who fantasize that women who don't abide by their religion's "values" are "fallen women," therefore they need to "repent."

Repent so by doing time at the Magdalene laundries, a purgatory where you have to work for hours without pay. It is also where the Catholic Church's dirty laundries are exposed, to the workers at least: a manipulative and corrupt Mother Superior, a perverse priest, basically the Church in their not-so-human form.